1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a printer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventionally, in a process of printing a fixed format, in order to do printing at a high speed, a portion to be repetitively printed being made of commonly-printed portions including a name of a firm, a ruled line, or a like is transmitted and is registered in advance as a “form” from a high-order device to a printer and a non-repetitive portion to be printed being made of non-repetitive portions including an address, a name, an amount or a like is transmitted independently from the form as a “non-form” and the form is overlaid on the non-form to do printing in the printer.
Therefore, in the conventional printer, by using a printer language having a macro function to register the form and by performing simultaneous processes of both the registered form and the non-form, overlay printing is done.
However, in the above conventional printer, not only the printer language to be used for the form and the printer language to be used for the non-form have to be the same, but also, whenever printing is done, an analysis of a command and expansion of the form to bit-mapped data are necessary and, as a result, time required to complete printing is made longer.
Moreover, to solve this problem, use of the printer language having no macro function may be possible, however, in that case, since, whenever printing is required, it is necessary to transmit the form and non-form, from a high-order device to the printer, the receipt and analysis of a command of a form and expansion to bit-mapped data are required, which causes the time required to complete printing to be made further longer.